ISLAMIST groups first identified Britain’s universities as a fertile recruiting ground almost two decades ago.

They followed the example set by the far Left, which had been hugely successful in the 1980s in attracting young people with impressionable minds to simplistic utopian ideologies.

The Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) organisation — which at the time was under the control of the radical cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed — was active on a number of campuses.

Over a period of weeks in 1988, as a young journalist reporting on the radicalisation of Muslim youth, I often accompanied one of Bakri Mohammed’s organisers as he criss-crossed London arranging and talking at meetings in university rooms and mosques.

Despite being a full-time employee of Islington council, his working day appeared to be devoted to preaching the message of Islamist radicalism, which was then a novelty but is now well rooted in many young Muslims.

One of the meetings was at King’s College London, where he delivered a talk to Muslim students about the necessity of returning to the golden age of the Khilafa, an Islamic state to be governed by strict religious law. It was a sparsely attended event. But more than ten years later, at similar meetings at the same college, a young man called Omar Sharif was radicalised by what he heard.

Sharif, an undergraduate from Derby, quickly became devout, began to wear traditional Islamic dress, and ended friendships with non-Muslims. Soon afterwards he left King’s and went to Damascus to study Arabic.

Returning to Britain, Sharif forged links with Omar Bakri Mohammed (by then split with HuT and running his al-Muhajiroun movement) and with Abu Hamza, the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque.

In April 2003, Sharif and another young Briton, Asif Hanif, went to Tel Aviv, where they became the first foreign suicide bombers in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.

Sharif was not the only young man to be radicalised at university and go on to a life of violent jihad. Omar Saeed Sheikh, who has been convicted in Pakistan for his part in the kidnap and murder of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist, was first exposed to the Islamist ideology at the London School of Economics.

Student unions and vice-chancellors have made various attempts to tackle the problem but have trodden carefully for fear of being accused of Islamophobia. The radical groups have continued to organise and indoctrinate, often under false names, and have found the process increasingly easy in the climate of anger surrounding the Iraq war.

Jewish students at the School of Oriental and African Studies have complained of fearing for their personal safety because of the pronouncements of some fellow students. Members of student Islamic societies have been among those arrested and charged in recent counter-terrorist operations.

Campus radicalism persists and is spreading. Mere “guidance” from mandarins in the Department for Education is unlikely to stop it.

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